Saturday, March 12, 2011

Optimize your referencing on Bing (Part 1)

Since the launch of  Bing in June of 2009, you are maybe looking to optimize your refenrincg in Bing Search, the new search tool by Microsoft. This guide will be in 3 parts.

Referencing on Bing : optimization on page

Title Tag

  • Put the most important words in the beggining because they are the most used by the algorithm.
  • Try to not go over 65 characters (and use more than 5 characters).
  • For the deep pages, first put the most strategic words, then the description words of the page cateogyr, and then eventualy the website title.
  • Ensure to never have 2 identical titles.
  • Do not use special characters such as : '"<>{}[]()

Meta description Tag

Even though it is not used by the classement algorithm, it can be used by Bing to show the snippet (description of your website). Some tips :
  • Make specific descriptions for each of your pages (never repeat the same description for more than 1 page).
  • Never re-use the Title Tag category, vary expressions and adopt a more incitative style.
  • Try to use between 25 and 150 characters.
  • Do not use : '"<>{}[]()

Meta keywords Tag

Don't hope alot from this Tag... Even though Bing says it's useful, so you can still make one..
  • Use secondary expressions from the one used in the Title Tag.
  • Don't use more than 874 characters for the whole tag (comes from Bing).
  • Don't repeat a word more than 4 times.

Other Meta Tags

Here are some other meta tags used by Bing :
  • <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="{code langue}" /> : To show your website language (See the codes on W3C)
  • <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> : To show the characters type used (UTF-8, etc.). See the list on IANA)
  • meta robots :  To set up the what the bot will do.

Put forward words in the page

To put forward some words in the page (and hope that the page will have be better classified), put them in specific tags :
  • sub title (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 ou h6)
  • a link (tag "a")
  • bold : strong tag (more than "b")
As for titles and subtitles :
  • only use one level 1 title per page (h1 tag)
  • use as many sub titles as needed ( h2 to h6 tag)
  • Try not to use more than 150 to 200 words for the title (it's alot !)

Optimize pictures for Bing

Even though it's more useful to use text than pictures, some tips :
  • include keywords in the picture's file name.
  • use text more than picturses themselves to make a link.


    Next part coming soon !


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10 comments:

  1. Learned a lot this post, thanks.

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  2. I didn't know about any of this! Thanks for the info!

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  3. Yeah getting to Bing has always eluded me for some reason, this post helps quite a bit!

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  4. awesome. looks like i should try this! thanks. :]

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  5. hey great info, I didn't know anything about meta tags

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  6. very useful, although i never use bing, mostly google and yahoo.

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  7. meta description actually needs to be 150-180 characters!

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  8. Good tips ! But are there really people who use Bing ?!

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  9. Looking forward to the next part!

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